Tom Hayden (yes, that Tom Hayden) announced his switch from Bernie to Hillary. Go read the whole thing:
The Democratic primary may deepen this antagonism and result in defections among Hillary supporters. Hillary wants limits on fracking: a ban where individual states have blocked it, like in New York; safeguards against children’s and family exposures; a ban where releases of methane or contamination of ground water are proven; and full disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. Bernie’s position is that he’s simply against all fracking.
But Hillary’s position goes beyond what virtually any state has done. The New York Times writes that she “has pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay for her ambitious climate plan” and intends to install 500 million solar collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that will bring a even greater change.
Meanwhile, Bernie’s total fracking ban leaves the question of how to do so unaddressed. His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of Citizens United?
Of course, now he’s a scumbag sellout. I read it on Facebook!
I am not interested in a point by point wonkish plan that’s meant to win debating points around the tubes, when it is as dead as Bernie’s aspirations in the Congress. I want to know how much fossil fuel money is behind Hillary and what the transcripts of her expensive sermons to the moneyed elites say about the probability of action.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics.
This was true in the Roman Senate.
I assume it will be true 2000 years hence, if any people remain alive to conduct politics.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Just because something has always been doesn’t mean it must always be.
Just because it sounds impossible doesn’t mean that it is.